My personal Leopard good/bad list (ongoing)

Here's an ongoing list of things I haven't read elsewhere.

Why not?  Everyone else is doing it:

PROS:

• Spotlight searches list your e-mail attachments as separate documents, which is great for me, as most of the documents that are on my network are also documents I've either sent or received.
• Mail Outbox is now a permanent fixture.
• Bulleted and numbered lists in Mail!
• Connected servers disconnect almost immediately when going offline.  This used to be a huge headache on my laptop, as it would get very hang-ish for several minutes when I was connected to my office server and lost internet access.
• Thank god.  Finally, one click performs an action in a background app, instead of having to click to bring the app to the foreground and THEN being able to click to perform the action.  This has been noted elsewhere as being able to scroll background documents without bringing them to the foreground, but it's more than that.

CONS:

• Notes notes notes.  Okay, I get notes' integration into e-mail being a good thing.  But why then is there a completely unrelated Stickies application AND a further unrelated notes application in Dashboard?  I love notes.  Love 'em.  I desperately wanted system-wide notes - why can't I highlight text in any document, right-click, and select SAVE AS NOTE? Why can't I?  Why can't I select a Safari page or part of a page and MAKE A NOTE FROM IT?  Why doesn't the Stickies application access a central notes database?  WTF, Apple??
• Still no consistency in apps when you close a window.  Some quit the program (iPhoto), most don't.
• Why can't I remove servers from my sidebar?  My work situation is that I have a ton of Macs connected to our network.  I see the first four or five listed alphabetically, then I can click on "all" (or something like that...I'm not working right now), but why can't I see a list of favorite servers instead?
• (added 12:42 PM) Bulleted and numbered lists (see above) don't properly show up in .mac webmail.  This has been a big issue with Mail; the way HTML mail is tagged in Mail doesn't properly render in other readers.  I'm still testing (Outlook, Entourage, other webmails still to come), but this isn't encouraging.
• (added 6:09 PM) Can't get my friggin' iCal to sync between my master computer (desktop, still running Tiger) and my laptop running a clean install of Leopard.
• (added 11:28 AM on Sunday) I have Mail set to have Safari the default RSS reader; however, when I go to subscribe to an RSS feed in Safari, it asks me to subscribe in Mail.
• (added 1:40 PM on Sunday) The bullets, numbers and point size rendering works fine in Hotmail webmail.  That's more encouraging.  Bullets and numbers also work on the iPhone, but it deletes text size renders, which I'm sure is intentional.

NEUTRALS or UNDECIDEDS:

• General network behavior has changed.  Not sure if this is good or bad.  Unsunk iDisk now shows up as a server on my desktop, but (I believe) in Tiger, it didn't.  I think I prefer the Tiger behavior, but I'm not certain.

HDNet Movie Programming

Sometimes I sit idly, imagining the programming meeting between the HDNet staff and Mark Cuban.

HDNet Staff:  "This month we're looking at programming movies shot from 1971 to 1975 and set in the deep south."

SILENCE

HDNet Staff: "Mr. Cuban?  71 through 75?  Deep south?"

Mark Cuban:  "You know what I want to know.:

HDNet Staff: "Honestly, no, Mr. Cuban.  I'm new here and..."

Mark Cuban:  "It's in the employee manual, for Christ's sake.  Page 75."

HDNet Staff:  "Right.  I see it."

Mark Cuban:  "Then you now know the sole criterion for programming movies on my movie network.  I don't give a fuck when they're shot, or where they're set, or whether they're historical or whatever nonsense you people want to talk about."

HDNet Staff:  "Yes, sir.  Now I know, sir."

Mark Cuban:  "And?"

HDNet Staff:  "And yes."

Mark Cuban:  "And yes WHAT, you maggot?"

HDNet Staff:  "And yes, Harry Dean Stanton's in it."

Mark Cuban:  "OKAY THEN."

And he hangs up the phone.

, "is Harry Dean Stanton in it?"

Teen Drinking

I've been watching Friday Night Lights (short version: the best TV show ever made about the kind of person who used to beat me up), and the level of teen drinking is notable.  I'm no prude (though I was much more of a stoner than a drinker in high school), but all the teen drinking (and the teen drinking in other recent series, like The O.C.) has gotten me thinking.

Where are our beloved institutional scolds on this issue?  Surely the drinking age in this country is still 21?

Graduate Film Students

Sitting with friends, having a drink in a hotel bar.

"Hey!" (from behind me.)  I turn.

"Hey!" I respond, recognizing a group of friends, also randomly assembled at the bar.  "What are you doing?"

"Charity poker event.  I came in eighth."

"Cool, man.  What's the charity for?"

"Graduate film students who've maxed out their credit cards paying for school."

There are days when I randomly run into people I know in this vast city, and it makes me happy, appreciating how a city of nearly 10 million people can self-select into a series of interconnected villages.  

Then there are days when some incredibly inane, insular comment pierces my consciousness and I wonder what the fuck I'm doing here.  

Rarely are the two days combined into a single, 2-minute event.

HBO: making me mental

HBO is showing Practical Magic on HBO HD, and they're showing it letterboxed.

My confusion knows no bounds.

What I have learned today

Iraqis hate Al Qaida more than they hate the U.S.

We have to get out of there.

Politicization

As one blog after another, and one news article after another, recounts the politicization of the justice department, the CDC, the FDA, the GSA, and whoever's next, let us not forget the mother of all politicization efforts, and by far the one with the most tragic consequences:

Iraqi reconstruction in the early (potentially effective) days.

We can, after all, fix our own infrastructure, however slowly and painfully, without the loss of a hundred thousand plus civilian lives.

HBO

Why does HBO show its HD movies in fullframe (the HD equivalent of pan and scan)? Showtime HD shows its movies letterboxed.

And why are the only seven exceptions to the above rule (that I've ever seen) the six Star Wars movies and...Without Limits, the Robert Towne movie about Steve Prefontaine??

'04 Kandyd vs. '07 Kandyd

Things I am learning while re-reading my posts from 2004:

• I was pissed-the-fuck-off at the way this country was being run. (Now, I'm mostly numb with occasional bouts of sadness, followed immediately by a resigned lowering of the head and topped off by playing Nintendo Wii.)
• I wrote a couple of coherent, long-ish posts that hold up pretty well. I'm not sure I could do that today.
• I was occasionally pretty funny, and the things that made me post funny things in 2004 are still making me laugh in 2007.
  

Has it really been two-and-a-half men...er, years?

The best thing about waiting 2 and a half years between posts (my post-election depression was rapidly replaced with the depression of having my worst fears realized) is that all the crap I wrote in August of 2004 is still on my main page. Here's a sample:

Still waiting for him to give that speech about sending troops to Sudan. Thursday's only a couple of days away....

That was from Tuesday, August 31, 2004.

Still waiting.

Banana Republicans

Kevin Drum, so far as I know, came up with the term.

(No, actually, apparently there's a book from 2004 with the title, though it didn't feel quite as banana republic-y back then.)

In any case, it couldn't be more fitting. I hope it catches on. Could be our answer to being called the Democrat Party.

Jingoism

Not usually prone to it, but I have to admit that it really irritates me when I have to go all the way down to "U" to select "United States" in a drop-down menu on a web form.